A friend tells me women don’t remember giving birth very well. Memory is actually much worse when we’re stressed, she says.

Sarah Schulman in Conflict Is Not Abuse. “If conflicted people were expected and encouraged to produce complex understandings of their relationships, then people could be expected to negotiate, instead of having to justify their pain through inflated charges of victimization. And it is in the best interest of us all to try to consciously move to

When they introduce me at the UN, it feels more than polite, it feels fictious. The list of compliments. The clapping. I think other people need to believe that I can do good too.

when it made me ignore my strength because it wasn’t as valuable as my flexibility, I ignored so much of myself that what I considered acts of perseverance in fact left me with little to persevere for.

I worry that when I do not explain exactly where my income and my voice come from, I am helping export the American myth, the one that promises opportunity while it promotes hierarchy.[8]

Wear: a beaded, scalloped necklace on the days you cannot express dissent verbally. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg)[5]

Thank you, Damani Baker, for building a life with me that has space for grief and pleasure, art and children, adventure and peace.

Good stories, like photographs, freeze meaning; they turn memory into memorized lines.

To avoid abusive power means deciding that the power of these men isn’t something we want,[4] isn’t something that can make our lives better, or more just, or more sustainable. And when I work for them, I am participating, exploiting those further down the ladder.